The Civil War as a Conflict of Regional Cultures

With the success of the Republican coalition in 1860, the southern regions lost control of the Senate, House of Representatives and presidency altogether for the first time since the eighteenth century. New England had often been in that position before, but its culture had discouraged violent responses. Southern folkways caused a different reaction. The Republican victory was seen not only as a challenge to southern interests, but as an affront to southern honor and a threat to southern freedom—that is, to its special ideas of hegemonic liberty and natural liberty. Without consciousness of contradiction, southern masters cast their defense of slavery in libertarian terms, and demanded the freedom to enslave.

The Republican coalition promised not to interfere with slavery where it already existed, but proposed to halt its expansion into new territories, and to protect its own ideas of ordered liberty and reciprocal liberty. Both the north and south began the Civil War in a defensive mood, determined to preserve two different ways of life.

The war was not a contest of equals. In 1861, the Union outnumbered the Confederacy in total population by 2.5 to 1, and in free males of military age by 4.4 to 1. So different had been the pattern of economic growth in the two sections that the north exceeded the south in railroad mileage by 2.4 to 1, in total wealth by 3 to 1, in merchant ships by 9 to 1, in industrial output by 10 to 1, in firearms production by 32 to 1, and in coal mining by 38 to 1. A much smaller proportion of northern workers were farmers, but the Union outreached the Confederacy in farm acreage by 3 to 1, in livestock by 1.5 to 1, in corn production by 2 to 1 and in wheat production by 4 to 1.

But the south was superior to the north in the intensity of its warrior ethic. The southern states produced a larger proportion of regular army officers than did the north. There were many military academies below the Mason-Dixon line and few above it. Militia units were more popular in the south; in 1852, for example, Massachusetts had one militia officer for every 216 men; North Carolina had one officer for every sixteen men. By 1864, 90 percent of southern freemen were fighting, compared with 44 percent in the north.¹

In defense of their different cultures, the two sections also fought differently. The armies of the north were at first very much like those of Fairfax in the English Civil War; gradually they became another New Model Army, ruthless, methodical and efficient. The Army of Northern Virginia, important parts of it at least, consciously modeled itself upon the beau sabreurs of Prince Rupert. At the same time, the Confederate armies of the southwest marched into battle behind the cross of St. Andrew, and called themselves “Southrons” on the model of their border ancestors.²

The regional cultures of the northern and southern states also appeared in the politics of the Civil War. The greatest figure of the war, Abraham Lincoln, perfectly represented the Republican coalition of regional cultures. Lincoln’s abiding sense of morality in politics, his lifelong defense of ordered liberty, the simplicity and strength of his biblical prose, his plain style and egalitarian manner were all derived from the folkways of his Puritan and Quaker ancestors, and personified the high moral ideals that lent power and seriousness to the Union cause.³

Below the Mason-Dixon line, the leaders of the Confederacy were also products of their regional folkways. Their ideals were personified in the character of Robert E. Lee—himself the direct descendant of an English gentleman who had moved to Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century. Lee’s nobility of conduct symbolized an ethic of honor which had existed in his region for many generations. The symbolic qualities of Lincoln and Lee were often far removed from the sordid realities of the Civil War. But symbols themselves became realities of high importance in this great and terrible strife.⁴

Within the Confederacy, southern folkways were also the source of major weaknesses in the war effort. The Confederacy did not die of democracy, as some conservative scholars have argued, but suffered much from the vices of its old oligarchical ways—in particular from the extreme restlessness of southern gentlemen under any sort of restraint, their exaggerated sense of personal honor and their lack of sympathy for the rights of others. The same cultural values which caused secession were also partly responsible for its eventual defeat.

The events of the war itself radically transformed northern attitudes toward southern folkways. As casualty lists grew longer northern war aims changed from an intention merely to resist the expansion of southern culture to a determination to transform it. As this attitude spread through the northern states the Civil War became a cultural revolution.

The results were mixed. The southern armies were broken by the north, and southern slavery was abolished. But southern culture survived the war, and so did its animus against the north. An extreme but not untypical example of this attitude was the Virginia secessionist Edmund Ruffin, who was said to have fired one of the first shots of the war in 1861, pulling the lanyard on a cannon aimed at Fort Sumter in Charlestown harbor. After the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in 1865, he fired the last shot of the war into his own brain, committing suicide after composing a defiant epitaph for himself and his cause. “With what will be my last breath,” he wrote, “I here repeat and would willingly proclaim my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, and the perfidious, malignant and vile Yankee race.”⁵ Many Confederates shared his attitudes, which did not bode well for the prospects of postwar Reconstruction.